The Old Fashioned Way
by Swirly Macarena
Summary: It doesn't matter how far apart you are; you can still be together. Entry for Stoplight Melody's contest.


**This is for Stoplight_Melody's challenge. In honor of that, I'm posting her usual story info at the top. I hope that's alright.**

**Title:** The Old Fashioned Way  
**Author:** Swirly  
**Summary:** It doesn't matter how far apart you are; you can still be together.  
**Pairings:** Abby/Hoagie  
**Words:** 749

* * *

There is no beach, no ocean, no pool. No sprinklers to dart through or poorly crafted lemonade stands dotting every curb of every street. It's like everything summery about summer had been utterly stripped away.

Instead, Hoagie gets an endless field of beige colored grass and a little farm in middle-of-nowhere Kansas. The sun is his only familiar friend there.

* * *

The state she's in has more promise. The beach is still absent but in its place she finds herself with a lake in the backyard. And even if the lake isn't what peaks her interest about the vacation home it's a nice method of cooling down.

She and Cree are civil-and those instances are otherwise few and far between-and she's found a few local kids to spend the long days with. And at night, Abby writes emails to three of the four email addresses she has saved in the memory of the computer. Kuki. Nigel. Wally. Always in that order.

But Hoagie's different. For such a technological geek he seems out of touch with any social aspects that the computer has to offer. She tried before, emailing him, but as it turns out his e-address was just a placeholder, a word to take up space. It was just a name collecting dust somewhere in the far corners of the web.

For him, she picks up a pen and paper and uses a real address.

Abby hated the idea at first, as she was always moving forward with her culture. That's the reason why the dinosaurs died, because they forgot to keep evolving, and Abby _was not _going to let herself become a buried and forgotten fossil.

It grew on her, though, and she found herself wishing that Kuki and Nigel and Wally might find the joys in writing actual letters, too. No. Maybe she'd just keep it between herself and Hoagie.

* * *

Sent outside to do some chores, he finds himself instead hiding in the fields of wheat that he'd been avoiding. Why anyone (especially his aunt) would want to live in this dull town was beyond him.

What starts out as sketching something that resembles a toaster and a weapon simultaneously, magically transforms into an undisturbed session of letter writing.

Hoagie's pen paints Abby pictures of the gang of thugs he sent packing from the small town, his last expedition to find a lost Yipper card, and many other adventures that he's not really having. For some reason, he doesn't want her to know the truth.

"Those are lies," comes the truth from a person standing over his shoulder, startling Hoagie. His niece. The niece who looks so much like him (they are related, after all) but her personality...he can't help it. It reminds him of the very person whose name is taking up space in the margin of his letter.

"Mind your own business, Amanda," Hoagie responds as he turns his body to block the paper from her view. It's just his luck that the little girl just recently reached the reading age. And the age where you learn morality, apparently.

"Fine. But you should never have to change for your friends." Amanda skips off.

When did five year olds get so wise?

* * *

She yawns and her eyelids droop; tricking her into thinking she's tired. But once Abby lays down on her bed her brain, her heart, her adrenaline tells her that it isn't time to sleep yet.

Cree knocks on the door and enters tentatively, with a bright manila envelope in hand. Hoagie's letter came, of course, on the day Abby neglected to check the mail. But Cree doesn't notice that her sister is far from sleeping and deposits the letter onto her nightstand.

_"Dear Abby," _it reads, _" I don't have an adventure to tell you about this time. This time, I'm going to be honest. I'm not going to pretend that I'm having fun or that this place isn't boring. And honestly, the only thing that's actually any fun about being here is writing letters. To you."_

Abby smiles. It's so short and to the point. Only one paper this time, where Hoagie's been known to send them in massive clumps.

She can usually sense the distance with her friends like it's a gaping wound or a hole in the heart. But for a fleeting instance, it doesn't feel like she and Hoagie are half a country apart. She can swear that he is standing in her bedroom, with her.


End file.
